The Valley and the Roundabout:a tale of two Silicons

Dan CrowCTO, Songkick@crowquine

A bit about meBSc Comp. Sci. PhD in Artificial Intelligence

Art of Memory - early UK startup

Apple for 4 years

4 valley startups: Verb, Qbiquity, Guru/Unicru, Blurb

Co-founder and CTO, Blurb

5 years at Google NY and London

Now: CTO, Songkick

The valley

At least 3 valleysSan Jose - hardware

Intel, Applied Materials, AMD, National Semi

Mountain View/Palo Alto - VCs, large companies

Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Mozilla, LinkedIn, eBay

San Francisco - consumer startups

Twitter, Foursquare, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Yelp

Culture of the valleyOptimism

Risk taking

Failure

Innovation

Openness (with exceptions)

Cycle of life

What is a startupNew company

Built to scale fast

Almost always tech centric

Irrational optimismEntrepreneurs are optimists

Ignore the naysayers

Believe you can change the world

Believe everyone wants what you create

Believe, even in the face of contrary evidence

Mitigated riskRisk taking is the heart of

entrepreneurship

Tech clusters offer risk mitigation

Always another startup to go to

Shared knowledge and understanding

FailureYou learn more from failure than

success

The great ones pick themselves up and try again

Failure is not stigmatized

Fail fast

Fail forward to success

InnovationAdvances in tech

Advances in product

Disrupting existing markets

Creating new markets

Innovation comes from smart, ambitious people tackling hard problems

OpennessKnowledge sharing

explicit: meetups, hacker groups etc.

implicit: people moving between companies

Open source movement

But guarded: competition makes people wary

Cycle of lifeMany large companies in the valley (Google, Cisco, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Adobe...)

Constant stream of people starting new companies

Universities (Stanford, Berkeley) generate startups

Huge influx of talented workers from across the globe

The valley is a mindsetThe valley reinvents itself every decade or so:

60s hardware; 70s/80s micros; 90s web; 00s social

It’s a way of thinking about the future, then creating it

It’s about experimenting, failing, trying again

Get the best and the brightest together, solve problems

The Roundabout

Silicon RoundaboutLondon is the center of a new UK startup movement

Started around 2007 with 10 companies

Now between 500 and 1500 companies

Thousands of people employed

Exclusively Internet software tech

London successLast FM - $240M acquisition by CBS

Mind Candy - over 60M users

Tweetdeck - acquired by Twitter

Wonga - over $100M in revenues

Shazam - over 100M users

Songkick - over 6M users

Established companiesGoogle - over 750 employees in London

Twitter - first non-US eng office

Facebook - first non-US eng office

Microsoft - Bing and Xbox engineering

Skype - HQ in London

Amazon - new engineering centre

Roundabout vs ValleyDiversity

Collaboration

Mostly small companies

First time entrepreneurs

Evolving VC scene

Monoculture

Competition

All sizes of company

Seasoned entrepreneurs

Mature VC scene

• Tell us who your favorite artists are and we’ll tell you when they come to your town to play live

• Transforming live music with Detour

• One of the original Silicon Roundabout startups

• 30 people, 6M monthly uniques

• We’re hiring! songkick.com/jobs